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Mother's Cookies
Two cups of sugar, one-half cup of melted butter, two eggs, six tablespoons of milk, one teaspoon of cream of tartar, one-half teaspoon of soda; just flour enough to enable you to roll out the dough and cut in shape. Bake in hot oven.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the kind kept in a stone crock and handed out between meals. The recipe assumes you know what cookie dough should feel like, since it never tells you how much flour to use.
- The flour is the whole problem"Just flour enough" works out to roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups for a dough stiff enough to roll, but it depends on your eggs and how warm the butter is. Add it a cup at a time and stop when the dough holds together and pulls cleanly from the bowl; another half cup past that gives you a hard, dry cookie.
- Hot ovenIn this period that is usually taken as somewhere around 400-425F, though the term was elastic and ran higher in some books. Thin rolled cookies at that heat are done in 6 to 8 minutes, and they go from pale to scorched in under a minute, so watch the second tray rather than trusting the timer from the first.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder, in the usual 2:1 ratio. If you would rather not keep cream of tartar, 2 teaspoons of double-acting baking powder does the same work here.
- SaltNone is listed. Butter of the period was commonly salted for keeping, which may be why. With unsalted butter, add 1/2 teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- Chill before rollingMelted butter makes a slack dough. An hour in the refrigerator makes it far easier to roll thin and cut without stretching the shapes out of true.
- FlavoringThe receipt gives none, which is authentic to the plain village cookie. A grating of nutmeg, a teaspoon of vanilla, or a little lemon zest all sit comfortably in this dough if you want more than sugar and butter.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen cookies cut at 2 1/2 inches and rolled a scant 1/4 inch thick. They keep a week in a tin and freeze well as raw cut rounds.
Rolled sugar cookies leavened with cream of tartar and soda were the backbone of American home baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when both chemicals became cheap and reliable at the village store and, it is often said, worked against older yeast-raised and egg-beaten methods. Community cookbooks are full of them under names that identify the contributor rather than the cookie -- "Mother's Cookies" and the like -- because the point of such a collection was to record whose version a neighbor should ask for. The vagueness about flour is not carelessness: a cook who had made the dough a hundred times judged it by feel, and the printed receipt was a memory aid rather than a set of instructions for a stranger.